Corona Senryu II

With beards and long hair,
Men protest the shutdowns, but
Later call doctors.

Republican Hell

All is not well.
The world has gone to hell
Because all we want to sell
Are guns that fire a shell
Faster than time can tell
The seconds when victims fell,
Bleeding enough to fill a well.
‎The leaders you elected smell
Like the sulfur they'll breathe in hell,
Foul odors we should expel
The next election by a groundswell
Of people, like me, compelled
‎To shake you by the lapels
And leave you with this bombshell:
Vote Republican and I foretell –
To all that's good just say farewell.

The Morning After

I woke up at 4:00 am today, unable unable to sleep. Rain fell outside. Was God crying? Or urinating on us all? How could a compassionate, just God sanction this election?  Most Christian Evangelicals voted for Trump, a complete betrayal of their religious beliefs. In their hypocritical hearts, they know Trump's religious gestures are mere theater. Never has it been more tempting to boldly proclaim the virtue of atheism.

A panic attack kept me awake. Vaguely, I recall the fear constrict my chest and knew instinctively that it was the same fear Trump's supporters felt. They surrendered to this animalistic drive, irrational by nature, at the polls yesterday. It was an epiphany: understanding this fear was a key to penetrating the dark, unspeakable mystery of our national political climate. How each of us responds to this fear individually will affect the course of our country, and in turn, the world.

I dressed for work as if for a funeral, all in gray - gray suit, gray tie, gray shirt - gray like the cloudy day that was dawning and still I moved about as if in a bad dream, slowly.  To deny reality is human. Uneducated racists do not have a monopoly on denial. But my clock kept ticking. Because I could accept the possibility that I would be late for work, I admitted I was awake. I had lived through what history will record as our worst election for all its resemblance to 1932 Germany.

Stepping outside, the fear subsided but still lingered. It cast a small shadow in me, like the shadow of leaves on pavement after the rain.  What I did with this fear was my own burden. So I secured the fear, until I could regain my reason, by using a talisman.

I dressed in mourning because something died last night, a grand experiment on tolerance unique in history.  But I placed a small, white handkerchief in my breast jacket pocket. The Christians - the authentic ones - have a story about Jesus who survived death and will one day return. Only their hope sustains that story. The thin, white line in my breast pocket was my own talisman of hope. Perhaps America will return from death some day. And perhaps how we vanquish the animal fear will usher the resurrection. But for today I just need to touch the white fabric often, to navigate the sadness until I can again think.

Dissent

If a nation
Founded on the ideal - the sublime appeal -
Of individual liberty, should shine and not
Vanish from the earth,
Then at its hour of birth, the nation should relent,
That seeds of liberty must also sprout dissent.

And, if in that shout of contradiction,
Should be raised a moral vision
To shake our institutions
At their innermost foundations,
Then should we recall
That dissent seeks to forestall the fall
Of those dear and cherished freedoms.

A far cry from the critic
Who would redesign our structures
Is the nihilist who furthers
A complete and utter rupture -
That ideological arsonist
Who would burn the entire edifice
Of our popular democracy.

Therefore let us pray we don't confuse,
Confound, misunderstand.
The dissenter who may take a stand
Against popular but harsh opinion
Is no demagogue's minion.
The nation cannot find its way
If dissenters face our wrath.
They struggle in their way to say
That we stray off our rightful path.

Self-Evident

In the course of human events,
A crumpled page in a drawer was found,
Such words that boldly astound,
And history's course would have bent,
If by them we had been bound:

“We hold these truths
To be self-evident,
That all men are created equal,
That they are endowed by their Creator
With certain unalienable Rights,
That among these are Life, Liberty
And the pursuit of Property.

“But for the Claim of Property,
History would show no Thieves,
Their daggers held in centuries’ sleeves -
The Governments among Men.
The respectability they lend
To the long train of usurpation
Should lead to question the Creation
Of this Sovereign over Men.

“Self-evident then is the truth
That to happily pursue their Property
Men must have unfettered Liberty
That very end of all Government -
Of the Crown and of the Colony,
Excepting Nature, by Heaven sent.”

Was it Jefferson, Adams, or Franklin
Who tossed those drafted ramblings?
By the fortunate strokes of a pen
We were saved from a land where all men,
To accumulate endless property,
Take the life and liberty of others
While Government idly does nothing,
Having long ago, by declaration,
Been quietly strangled and smothered.

Horror

Strange that our Election Day
Is scarcely but a week away
From Halloween.

Strange, too, it seems

That we elect our nation’s head
Ever so close
To the Day of the Dead.

But stranger still we do not see

The leaders we select, the knaves,
Are monsters from our mental graves.

We vote for ghosts of yesterday.

We vote for zombies of today.
We vote for vampires of tomorrow,
Without thought to future sorrow. 

Indeed the choice has often been

The lesser of two evils.
But few can stare into the eyes
Of a horror more primeval.

The beast that shambles

To the voting booth,
With greedy eye and hungry tooth,
That tears at flesh
And rends the truth,
That creature with an empty mind
And shrunken heart
Who casts his ballot in the dark -

More terrible and stark

Than a rapacious leader
Is that voter who,
Without knowledge,
Without courage,
In that final hour
Bestows the leader’s power.

Labor Day

And what should we say remains
Of the workers in the days of trains?
And what should we say
Of your grandfathers
And your grandmothers
And the world they sought to claim?

Only the murals remain for us to see
Of men in soiled shirts straining to free
A generation from American serfdom
Through telegraph poles, railways,
And onward to freedom.

Down in a lost town, a lonely post office sits,
Its mural of men as giants on tractors and combines;
While the giant women fed the workers in long lines.

Now, those sculpted workers that stared into the future,
Their eyes grave, their jaws set, their brows furrowed,
Look on a present day no one had thought would follow.

For the government halls are empty of the spirit of the common good,
And the death song has long been sung of the union’s brotherhood,
And the silence that was heard before the strike at last was called
Is buried by the laugh of the rich men and their lawmakers in thrall.

What shall we say of Labor Day
That will carry any meaning
To your sons and daughters
Who, one fine day,
Will want to work with faces beaming?

Forgotten workers are lives in vain
Unless we, too, united strain
To ease the modern worker’s sorry plight –
Democracy dies without a fight.

Citizens United

On that bright summer day,
When you yelled at the Grand Canyon,
Your voice came gliding back
Across the chasm of a million years

Like when

On that balmy Sunday afternoon
Your voice came jumping back
At the children's zoo
When Marley the Parrot said,
Hello, stupid!
Pleased to meet you.
I like butter on my bread!

The ghosts of our childhood past
Cannot be heard over the constant din
Of the cash registers in the Modern World,
Nor seen over the constant grin
Of the shopkeepers
As they laugh and whirl.

The money you spend on the things you buy
Comes back to you -
Not by gliding, not by jumping -
But, softly, by turns slow and sly.

Pans and pots,
Cars and stocks,
Eggs and fish,
And a serving dish,
Belts and phones,
And rugs for homes,
Wine and blouses,
Leather purses,
Magazines
And gasoline,
TV sets and radios,
Chicken and tomatoes,
Toilet paper,
Office paper,
Soap and salt,
And modern art,
Shiny shoes,
And your club dues,
Dolls, shampoo,
And toothpaste, too -
All come slowly back to you

Like when

Your brothers lose their modest jobs;
The plant shutters, headed overseas;

Your friends lose their modest houses
And the banks decline their quiet pleas;

Your son can't see the doctor
Until the premium is received;

And your father sadly counts
More cars on roads than there are trees.

The voice that cried across the hills
And made fun of little parrots
For a simple childhood thrill
Is now fallen mute and still.

Money is the modern voice.
So decree your childhood ghosts:
Those without it make no noise,
And those that have it laugh the most.

Radio Days

My father’s
Widow’s father
Died in the night,
His last days spent
Listening without sight
To his radio, head bent

Towards the announcer, who
In the little radio
Sounded the friend to his ears,
The old neighbor of the years,
Since blindness forced
The long, slow goodbye
To the man in the picture box.

We grow old, we grow old;
We shall wear the bottom of our trousers rolled.

And what did the radio say?
Baseball -
It was always baseball:
War, famine,
The weather,
Friends, birthdays,
And the departed wife -
Life long ago lost its time slot
To baseball and the long shots
Hit over the fence -

Fence the neighbor leaned over
On long ago tropical mornings
And asked for the news
In perfect regional Spanish:

Do you know who vanished?
And what of the Revolution?
Will you flee to America?

We grow old, we grow old;
We shall wear the bottom of our trousers rolled.

Now, in his little chair,
In the little room with the curtains drawn,
Came the news of American baseball,
Fresh as the air at dawn,
And fifty-year-old Cuban baseball.
The years came from nowhere
Through the radio:

Those were radio days,
When the sun shone warmly,
Pleasantly, on supple skin,
Wearing shirt clean enough to work in,
And trousers fashionably rolled.

When the nights grew long and cold,
In between heartache and strife,
At the kitchen said his wife:
You grow old, you grow old,
You shall wear the bottom of your trousers rolled.
Therefore, mend them; let me mend them.

Still, the radio brought no news
Of the fences left to mend,
Of the wars the years would send,
Of the years that time would spend
To bring a body round the bend
Into the last inning.

One night,
With the heavens above spinning,
Came the announcer’s voice, grinning:
Good night to all, and to all a good night.
But before then, though without sight,
Let us hear the beginning,
Of that time in the inning
When the ball was sent spinning
Out past fences that never need mending,
Where we can write our own ending
And our games are played in the light.

Mourning in America

Legal rights
Are easily won
At the point of a gun.

But it takes patience
And determination
To win rights
Through agitation.

In some tenuous space
In the public square,
Face to face,
The human in you
Meets the human in me.

When faced with the thugs,
Atlas shrugged
And ran.
So here we stand:
The human in you and the human in me,
Holding up the world for all to see –
We can talk through, not around,
Our existence, with persistence.

Like roses, rights abound.
Pick them, share them.
Listen to the sound
Of the discourse in the public square.

But, oh, how you stare!
No, indeed, that is not our public square,
Where words like bullets wound all who care
To share the shoulder burden of citizenship,

Of the human in you
And the human in me.

Veterans Day

I. Our Brother Orwell

Defenceless villages
Are bombed from the air,
Inhabitants driven
To the countryside;
Cattle machine-gunned,
Huts set on fire:
This is called pacification.

For freedom, for justice,
For the American Way.

II. On Sale

Somewhere in the Homeland,
At the Wal-Mart café,
She chews on a hamburger
That drips mayonnaise.
Her jeans are too tight;
Her diabetes not slight.
Her children have run out of sight.

We have all come from far away
To catch the sale on Veterans Day.

III. Until Tomorrow

He stands, listing, in the doorway,
Knowing nothing of Orwell.
He had enlisted, recalling the day,
The travel had been a good sell.
Though the journey ended in hell,
He was told that he fought very well.
Now he makes peace with his sorrow
Because, he’s been told, that
His check will come in tomorrow.

Long live our soldiers, who, every day,
Fight to maintain the American Way.